'No Stupid Questions' (NSQ) Internet & Technology Edition

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Hmm. I imagine you're not being literal about the number, but can you reproduce on demand? I.e. if you go to CWindows, select n folders, right click 'open in new window', then select one more and do the same, it fails at same point every time? If it is that simple to reproduce should make diagnosing it easier. Or at least cause it to happen at approximately the same number of windows.

One lazy thing to try.
View->Options->View->'Launch folder windows in seperate process'

If that fixes it without downsides memory wise.. I'd just take the win. Otherwise, start in safe mode. See if can reproduce. If not, check Autoruns (Microsoft Sysinternals) for Windows Explorer shell extensions etc. Disable, restart, attempt to reproduce, look for problems. If not something like that I'd suggest looking at what antivirus/antimalware software you have installed.

30 is actually the usual number but 29-31 happens as well. I've looked at task manager on the number of open windows and just ctrl+n:ed a folder repeatedly, it's always within 29-31(I think I managed 32 once).

I run explorer in a separate process and I've unchecked that and tried, same result.

Thumbnails and everything like that is turned off both in folder options and advanced system settings, so it's not that, I even checked the thumbcache and it sits at 0kb. It doesn't actually matter what kind of folder it is, I've repeatedly opened "my computer" and it still hangs or starts drawing wonky windows aaand I just got the idea to shut off every graphical feature(this text looks like ass now) and try that.
Nope, 31st window is a faulty window that hangs. Tried it again with everything turned on, 30th window hangs. If I try again it might be the 29th, 30th or 31st, that's the range.

The faulty drawing of the GUI sticks around until a window is minimized/maximized or anything like that that forces windows to redraw it in it's entirety(windows doesn't redraw sections that it thinks is unchanged, so the wonkiness sticks around in the framebuffer), so Windows itself doesn't seem concerned.
It's not a graphics driver issue though.

There's no change in amount of RAM used before or after that, same with graphics memory and disk activity.

The only lead I have, or suspicion, is that ~30 is around the time when the list of open windows would get that crappy scroll button.

 

[Chad Nasty]

30 is actually the usual number but 29-31 happens as well. I've looked at task manager on the number of open windows and just ctrl+n:ed a folder repeatedly, it's always within 29-31(I think I managed 32 once).

I run explorer in a separate process and I've unchecked that and tried, same result.

Thumbnails and everything like that is turned off both in folder options and advanced system settings, so it's not that, I even checked the thumbcache and it sits at 0kb. It doesn't actually matter what kind of folder it is, I've repeatedly opened "my computer" and it still hangs or starts drawing wonky windows aaand I just got the idea to shut off every graphical feature(this text looks like ass now) and try that.
Nope, 31st window is a faulty window that hangs. Tried it again with everything turned on, 30th window hangs. If I try again it might be the 29th, 30th or 31st, that's the range.

The faulty drawing of the GUI sticks around until a window is minimized/maximized or anything like that that forces windows to redraw it in it's entirety(windows doesn't redraw sections that it thinks is unchanged, so the wonkiness sticks around in the framebuffer).
It's not a graphics driver issue though.

There's no change in amount of RAM used before or after that, same with graphics memory and disk activity.

The only lead I have, or suspicion, is that ~30 is around the time when the list of open windows would get that crappy scroll button.

I'm still wondering why you need this many windows open bro, like what are you doing?

 

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30 is actually the usual number but 29-31 happens as well. I've looked at task manager on the number of open windows and just ctrl+n:ed a folder repeatedly, it's always within 29-31(I think I managed 32 once).

I run explorer in a separate process and I've unchecked that and tried, same result.

Thumbnails and everything like that is turned off both in folder options and advanced system settings, so it's not that, I even checked the thumbcache and it sits at 0kb. It doesn't actually matter what kind of folder it is, I've repeatedly opened "my computer" and it still hangs or starts drawing wonky windows aaand I just got the idea to shut off every graphical feature(this text looks like ass now) and try that.
Nope, 31st window is a faulty window that hangs. Tried it again with everything turned on, 30th window hangs. If I try again it might be the 29th, 30th or 31st, that's the range.

The faulty drawing of the GUI sticks around until a window is minimized/maximized or anything like that that forces windows to redraw it in it's entirety(windows doesn't redraw sections that it thinks is unchanged, so the wonkiness sticks around in the framebuffer), so Windows itself doesn't seem concerned.
It's not a graphics driver issue though.

There's no change in amount of RAM used before or after that, same with graphics memory and disk activity.

The only lead I have, or suspicion, is that ~30 is around the time when the list of open windows would get that crappy scroll button.

Interesting. Would be worth trying safe mode etc. Who knows what Google or Microsoft Office or some antivirus have hooked into the shell extensions.

The scrolling in the task bar thing is potentially related as you say. Assume you have the stupid autogrouping turned off. Would be interesting to see if that made any difference.

 

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Actually, here's another suggestion. Check your explorer.exe handle counts in the 'properties' window in Process Explorer, second or third tab. On a recent Win10 I got up to about 8000 GDI handles once I'd opened 40-50 windows. The usual per process limit is 10,000, and while it can be adjusted there are other settings that might need tweaking too to handle more. It turns out that 'seperate process' option only creates seperate processes for the desktop shell and folder windows, not per-folder window processes, so that would explain why the problem would occur. If it isn't GDI handles it could be another limited Windows resource.

I wouldn't be surprised if some Google Drive addon or similar shell extension cruft is making the problem worse in your case, so worth seeing if there's stuff you can disable before just turning the handle limits up. Or shifting to another file manager (winfile.exe is open source now).

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Actually, here's another suggestion. Check your explorer.exe handle counts in the 'properties' window in Process Explorer, second or third tab. On a recent Win10 I got up to about 8000 GDI handles once I'd opened 40-50 windows. The usual per process limit is 10,000, and while it can be adjusted there are other settings that might need tweaking too to handle more. It turns out that 'seperate process' option only creates seperate processes for the desktop shell and folder windows, not per-folder window processes, so that would explain why the problem would occur. If it isn't GDI handles it could be another limited Windows resource.

I wouldn't be surprised if some Google Drive addon or similar shell extension cruft is making the problem worse in your case, so worth seeing if there's stuff you can disable before just turning the handle limits up. Or shifting to another file manager (winfile.exe is open source now).

Holy shit you're right! The 32nd window hung things at 9,999 GDI objects.

It seems like every new explorer window adds around 300-360 objects which explains why it's consistently crashing around 30. I wonder what would be a good way to poke at an explorer window and figure out what's using them. Googling it some people have the same problem with SolidWorks.

"I wouldn't be surprised if some Google Drive addon..."
oh no, I have adobe products installed... that's always asking for trouble.

(to those wondering, I don't need a ton of windows, it's the problem that is causing this that I don't want, something isn't right)

 

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Holy shit you're right! The 32nd window hung things at 9,999 GDI objects.
View attachment 1264186

It seems like every new explorer window adds around 300-360 objects which explains why it's consistently crashing around 30. I wonder what would be a good way to poke at an explorer window and figure out what's using them. Googling it some people have the same problem with SolidWorks.

"I wouldn't be surprised if some Google Drive addon..."
oh no, I have adobe products installed... that's always asking for trouble.

(to those wondering, I don't need a ton of windows, it's the problem that is causing this that I don't want, something isn't right)

NirSoft has a tool to list the handle types out in a more detailed fashion. If you disable some of the shell extensions in SysInternals Autoruns then you should be able to pin down whether that's the cause (might need to restart to get that to work, not sure).

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

NirSoft has a tool to list the handle types out in a more detailed fashion. If you disable some of the shell extensions in SysInternals Autoruns then you should be able to pin down whether that's the cause (might need to restart to get that to work, not sure).

I've poked around with GDIview and I don't know if it's unusual for explorer but it's extremely heavy on bitmaps. Four explorer windows have 502 bitmaps allocated while the entirety of Chrome with a couple of hundred tabs uses a total of 15. I assume bitmaps would be drawn objects that it keeps track of, like buttons, status on drives, all the crap in the ribbon and so on. Hm.

I tried to get ride of Adobe's Creative Cloud folders and they really knocked it out of the park with that one, other people have wanted to remove it for years but there's no setting or switch for that so the official adobe solution is to download a zip with a .reg file that prevents it from being listed in the sidebar. Fantastic.

 

[Longjack Attack]

How does one get started with Linux? I hear it runs faster than windows. What system should I start out with for beginners?

What's the best internet browser for security besides Tor cause I don't trust it.

 

[Never Scored]

How does one get started with Linux? I hear it runs faster than windows. What system should I start out with for beginners?

Mint is a good place to start, I think. I've used Linux off and on for years and it's still the distro I keep coming back to. It has a Windows 7 like interface and a simple graphical installer the same as Ubuntu. If you're capable of installing windows, you can install Mint.

What's the best internet browser for security besides Tor cause I don't trust it.

Palemoon or Ungoogled Chrominium. I use Palemoon

I'm interpreting "security" as it doesn't track what you do, because I think most modern browsers are reasonably secure with regards to keeping viruses and ransomware and shit off your computer as long as you're not stupid enough to download it.

*Edit* Here's a good rundown. (archive)

 

[Longjack Attack]

Mint is a good place to start, I think. I've used Linux off and on for years and it's still the distro I keep coming back to

Does it run faster than Ubuntu by any chance? I'm more focused on the speed performance of the system.

 

[Never Scored]

Does it run faster than Ubuntu by any chance? I'm more focused on the speed performance of the system.

Maybe try something like Xubuntu which is designed to be both lightweight and easy to use? At any rate, I did find a noticeable bump in performance switching my Macbook Pro from OS X to Mint.


I am far from a Linux expert so someone else can probably answer better. I'm sure you can build something really lightweight and fast using Arch or something, but that's not very user friendly.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Does it run faster than Ubuntu by any chance? I'm more focused on the speed performance of the system.

Download VMware Player or VirtualBox, both are free, install Mint(I prefer that one as well) as a virtual machine and play around with it. My recommendation would be VMware, in my experience it is snappier than VirtualBox.

If you mess anything up you can create a fresh install in a couple of minutes. Virtual machines are so good for so many things but they can also be used as fool-proof training wheels for learning. You can't mess up your computer this way.

 

[Ex Cummunicated Sasser HD]

I accidentally right clicked on a folder on my desktop that is over 470GB, and instead of rename, I accidentally hit "Share with Google Drive". This has caused a total shitshow, it's all stuff that I didn't need sharing, but now all my G accounts are saying I've gone over my 15GB storage. I've un synced the folder via the macOS app, but everything is still there, and I can't even get emails because all my storage space is filled up with crap. If I delete stuff on the Google Drive, It won't be removed from my desktop right? Theres like 100k+ files of stuff on there that are not in my Google Drive folder, but really need to keep all these files as they are work related and don't have enough to make a backup of the whole 470GB, but it doesn't tell me what is there or not. Desyncing the lot should stop it deciding to delete that folder right if I delete the crap in my Google Drive?

This is why there should be a yes/no option once you make a one click error.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I've poked around with GDIview and I don't know if it's unusual for explorer but it's extremely heavy on bitmaps. Four explorer windows have 502 bitmaps allocated while the entirety of Chrome with a couple of hundred tabs uses a total of 15. I assume bitmaps would be drawn objects that it keeps track of, like buttons, status on drives, all the crap in the ribbon and so on. Hm.

Found the problem.

 

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I accidentally right clicked on a folder on my desktop that is over 470GB, and instead of rename, I accidentally hit "Share with Google Drive". This has caused a total shitshow, it's all stuff that I didn't need sharing, but now all my G accounts are saying I've gone over my 15GB storage. I've un synced the folder via the macOS app, but everything is still there, and I can't even get emails because all my storage space is filled up with crap. If I delete stuff on the Google Drive, It won't be removed from my desktop right? Theres like 100k+ files of stuff on there that are not in my Google Drive folder, but really need to keep all these files as they are work related and don't have enough to make a backup of the whole 470GB, but it doesn't tell me what is there or not. Desyncing the lot should stop it deciding to delete that folder right if I delete the crap in my Google Drive?

This is why there should be a yes/no option once you make a one click error.

If there's a context menu/Google Drive settings option to stop syncing a folder you should definitely do that.

The other priority would be to uninstall Google Drive/Backup & Sync and then wipe out anything you can find on SO answers like the below that could cache configuration information. Reinstall, verify that it isn't still syncing those folders, and then you hopefully should be safe to axe the folders on Drive.

Completely remove Google Backup and Sync from my Mac

I'm running macOS High Sierra and sometime ago I uninstalled Google Drive from my machine. OR so I thought. Today I see the Backup and Sync app in my Applications folder and when I try and delete i...

apple.stackexchange.com

 

[Ex Cummunicated Sasser HD]

If there's a context menu/Google Drive settings option to stop syncing a folder you should definitely do that.

The other priority would be to uninstall Google Drive/Backup & Sync and then wipe out anything you can find on SO answers like the below that could cache configuration information. Reinstall, verify that it isn't still syncing those folders, and then you hopefully should be safe to axe the folders on Drive.

Completely remove Google Backup and Sync from my Mac

I'm running macOS High Sierra and sometime ago I uninstalled Google Drive from my machine. OR so I thought. Today I see the Backup and Sync app in my Applications folder and when I try and delete i...

apple.stackexchange.com

This worked thanks. Not gona re-install it as I only really use Dropbox now and Onedrive

 

[ToroidalBoat]

what does "scroll lock" even do?

 

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what does "scroll lock" even do?

Depends on the application. The traditional use was intended to be similar to what you might see in Excel today- allow scrolling with the arrow keys rather than changing the selection.

Under Linux, it behaves like 'Hold Screen' mode on a traditional terminal- stopping rapidly scrolling text from scrolling off the screen so you can read it and diagnose issues.

 

[MrJokerRager]

Is 100% percent scaling better on a 15.6 inch screen vs 125% default that windows sets. Also more crisp, that is for sure.

 

[Sunday School Dropout]

How do you fix a non scrolling mouse wheel?